12 Zodiac Signs

Find Your Chinese Zodiac Sign

Choose your date of birth and find out about your Chinese zodiac sign.

You are a:

Lucky numbers:

Lucky colors:

Work:

Wealth:

Love:

Health:

Chinese zodiac animals have lucky meanings. Chinese people associate each animal with certain characteristics. It's believed that people born in a given year have the personality of that year's animal. Click the animal signs below to learn more about each zodiac animal.

What's Your Zodiac Animal?

Each zodiac animal's year comes around every 12 years, and each year is associated with a zodiac animal. The most recent zodiac sign years are shown below.

Each Chinese zodiac animal has personality traits assigned to it by the ancient Chinese. Chinese people believe these traits will be embodied in people, according to their zodiac sign.

Ben Ming Nian (Zodiac Year of Birth)

As the Chinese zodiac recurs every 12 years, your animal year will come around when you are 12, 24, 36, 48, 60, 72, etc. According to ancient Chinese superstition, in your birth sign year, you will offend the God of Age, and will have bad luck during that year. Read more on How to be Lucky in Your Zodiac Year.

Chinese Zodiac Hours — Every hour has an animal.

It is widely known that each year is associated with a Chinese zodiac animal, but the animal signs are also assigned to months, days of the week, and hours.

According to professional Chinese astrology, a person's personality and life is more decided by his/her birth hour than year. Zodiac hours, days, months, and years are used together for in-depth character and destiny analysis. In popular astrology, by contrast, only the birth year is used.

In ancient times, in order to
tell the time, people divided a day into twelve 2-hour periods, and
designated an animal to represent each period, according to each animal's
“special time, according to
an ancient mnemonic and common observations.

Zodiac animal

Hours

Mnemonic

Observation

Rat

11pm-1am

Rats forage most actively.

The ancients heard them at this hour.

Ox

1-3am

Oxen chew the cud most comfortably.

People of old would get up and feed them at this time.

Tiger

3-5am

Tigers hunt most ferociously.

Chinese people long ago often hear them roaring at this time.

Rabbit

5-7am

Rabbits pound the ground most fervently.

Rabbits were seen to come out of their holes to eat grass with dew at dawn.

Dragon

7-9am

Dragons hover most thickly.

Morning mists, particularly coils around hills, made people think of dragons.

Snake

9-11am

Snakes emerge most readily.

Snakes come out to sun themselves as the morning sun warms the ground.

Horse

11am-1pm

Horses stand most impressively.

When the sun is strongest, only horses were seen standing, while most other animals would lie down to rest.

Goat

1-3pm

Goats eat and urinate most frequently.

This was reputedly the best time to herd goats, when the sun had dried the dew on the undergrowth.

Monkey

3-5pm

Monkeys play most vigorously.

Monkeys were seen and heard playing and calling in the trees at this time.

Rooster

5-7pm

Roosters return to their coops most routinely.

Roosters are routinely led back to their henhouses before sunset.

Dog

7-9pm

Dogs guard most dutifully.

People would take their dogs out to keep a watch at night before sleep.

Pig

9-11pm

Pigs snuffle most sweetly.

As they settled down to sleep, people heard pigs snouting their troughs.

Chinese Zodiac Years are based on Chinese lunar calendar

There are two dates a Chinese zodiac year could be said to start on:

Chinese New Year (day 1 of the lunar year), which is somewhere in the period January 21 to February 20

Start of Spring (day 1 of the solar year), the first day of the first solar term in the traditional Chinese solar calendar, which falls in the period February
3–5.

Most Chinese people use lunar new year as the start of the zodiac year. But for professional fortune telling, Chinese astrologers use 'Start of Spring' or solar new year as the beginning of the zodiac year.

Chinese Zodiac is Used to Predict People's Fortune

To make a relatively correct Chinese fortune prediction, people take many methods into consideration, such as face characteristics, palmistry, and more involved Chinese astrology including birth month, day, and hour, gender, etc.

Zodiac fortune prediction by birth year is only one of these methods. So you may only take Chinese zodiac birth sign horoscopes as a general reference.

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